ABSTRACT
A large percentage of the world's population lives in buildings constructed with load-bearing masonry. Masonry is commonly used to fabricate structural building components such as walls, arches and vaults. The high vulnerability of load-bearing masonry walls to lateral dynamic loads induces a risk of human losses and progressive collapse in buildings, particularly in case of blast loads. This chapter discusses the out-of-plane behaviour of load-bearing Tuff Stone Masonry (TSM) walls sub-jected to blast loading as a result of gas explosion. The main goal of this work was to develop a numer-ical model for dynamic response analysis and col-lapse safety assessment of TSM walls subjected to gas explosion loads. The lack of experimental data on this type of walls and loads motivated a numerical investigation by means of LS-DYNA software, which is an advanced computer program for structures subjected to impulsive and dynamic loads.
